One of the many ways hackers find to enter a website is via members or user logins.

Sophisticated software programming is used to run scripts on a site using popular usernames, often ‘admin’ and other frequently used as well as publicly displayed usernames, to ‘harvest’ their passwords.

Astonishingly, we frequently come across users of websites who ask to have their passwords changed from ‘password‘, as they now fear someone might guess it!

Er….yeah! Wouldn’t need software to hack that one!

But what a lot of people do not appreciate is that often, a users’s profile, their location, and often content that they may post can give clues to the basis of their password, so for example, a user named John Smith is likely to have been given the nickname ‘Smithy’ by his mates at school. Chances are that if he was born on 1986, his password will be something like Smithy86. His hotmail email address will probably be something like smithy86@hotmail.com.

Sound familiar?

If it does, then you’ll appreciate that we didn’t need a computer programme to come to these assumptions, so just imagine how much more effective hackers software would be in discovering passwords when running thousands of permutations per minute based upon keywords picked from data published by users!

FEAR NOT!

There is a simple solution that would significantly reduce
the likelihood of a user password being compromised.